50 Years Ago, Danzig Enclave Ceased To Exist

GDANSK, Poland -- On Sept. 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein bombarded a Polish garrison off Danzig, a free city, setting off World War II.

From the ruins that remained six years later, the Poles meticulously rebuilt the red brick architecture and gabled townhouses of Danzig, as well as the soaring brick churches and slender spires whose grace appears to exorcise the horrors that began there.

What was once an enclave within Prussia and a point of German business and commerce is now Gdansk, a Polish city, populated by families from throughout the Polish lands, many from territories that were absorbed into the Soviet Union as a result of the war.

It is the largest port serving Poland`s large if limping shipbuilding industry and, in this decade, the birthplace of the Solidarity labor movement.

But signs of the city`s past ordeals are still evident, and after 50 years, Poles still disagree on the lessons.

At Westerplatte, the windswept tongue of land where the war began, an immense granite monument, in the colossal style of Soviet socialist realism, recalls the Poles` courageous stand.

Nearby a rusting Soviet tank was set up by the Polish Communist government to remind Poles that the Red army liberated them from the Nazis.

But workers at the Pilsudski shipyards have prepared a document on the causes of the war that offers another view.

``In September 1939, the newly restored Polish state succumbed to the violence of two of its neighboring powers, Germany and the Soviet Union,`` it says.

There has always been a gap between what Poles learn from the official Communist history in the schools and what they learn of the war on their grandmothers` laps.

But the four-page document by the workers also reflected the widening distance in viewing the war between Poles of postwar generations, who now make up the majority of the population, and those who experienced first hand the horrors of the German occupation and the expulsion by the Soviets.

``It is as different as heaven and earth,`` said Andrzej Kozlowski, 30, a worker and an author of the document.

For the older generation, the war was the memory of horrors suffered, he said. For his generation, it was consciousness of the wrong done to Poland.

Four workers asserted that the West had failed, 50 years ago, to help Poland.

Despite intricate alliances, and a valiant effort by the Polish garrison at Westerplatte to hold out, expected assistance from France and Britain never arrived.

Then, on Sept. 17, Soviet troops moved into eastern Poland, completing the annihilation of the state.

Moreover, they agreed that the war memory had rendered their parents cautious, while in them, tales of the war had been a catalyst for change.

``My parents said after the war they got work and bread and a little bit of housing, and they said that before the war they worked and got nothing, so they said it was not so bad,`` Kozlowski said.

``For my part, they said don`t get involved. There will be terror, they said, this constant fear, don`t get involved.

``But I grew up in an entirely different situation,`` he said. ``I ended high school in the movement for a free Poland, I got a taste of history from books, I was continuously drawn toward Poland`s independence, which I now see is close.``

A friend from the yard, Tadeusz Kasperowicz, agreed. ``A new generation has grown up,`` he said. ``Lech Walesa was born in 1943.``